Actually, the Diefenbaker Conservatives have prior claim - the destruction (literally) of the Avro Arrow (the most advanced fighter of the time) at the behest of the US government because the Bomarc nuclear SAM missiles would supposedly make the Avro obsolete (funny how we still need jet fighters and bombers more than half a century later, isn't it).

I have to correct you on that there, as the CF-105 wasn't designed as a fighter -- it was designed as an interceptor. Interceptors (and in particular the CF-105) weren't designed for areal dogfighting with other fighter aircraft -- they were designed to take down larger aircraft such as bombers.

The purported reason for cancelling the Arrow project was that the world was moving away from nuclear capable bombers towards ICBMs. The threat that the CF-105 was designed for was Russian bombers flying over our northern coast, but the advancement of technology was making the need to fly bombers unnecessary, hence a straight-on interceptor was no longer necessary.

Indeed, today very few countries design or purchase straight-up Interceptor aircraft for their air defence. Fighter jets became advanced enough back in the 60's and 70's to take on the role of both fighter and interceptor as needed. A multi-role fighter-interceptor was a much better investment for a smaller country like ours.

You are also somewhat incorrect concerning the BOMARC missiles. While the US designed them to be nuclear capable, and the initial intention was to have Canada's inventory equipped with nuclear warheads, in the end Died the Chief caved into public pressure, and the nuclear option was scrapped. Eventually, of course, all of the BOMARC missiles were scrapped -- the mission they were intended for (destroying bombers flying towards the DEW line) evaporated in the face of ICBMs.

Today we face relative little danger from bombers from Russia flying over the north pole, and even should that happen we have modern advanced middles to take care of them. There really is no place for dedicated interceptors anymore, and there hasn't been for decades. Now none of that is to say that Diefenbaker was right to scrap the CF-105s -- the way the completed jets and all of their plans was dismantled/discarded/destroyed is a national disgrace. My family knows very well how this went down and the pain it caused -- my grandfather was a mechanic at AV Roe who worked on the Arrow project, and who became unemployed at the projects termination. His pride in the Arrow project and his regret at its destruction (and general anger towards Diefenbaker and his cabinet for causing it to happen) lasted until the last of his days.

Yes. But we need to be aware that man is not the only source of antibiotics. They naturally occur. We get a good lot of them from plants and bacteria, starting of course with penicilin which we got from mold, and which was already present on salted food and damp environments. What we did was to make antibiotics present in organisms other than their natural sources.

The United States has some disease reporting, it started at least 75 years ago before the antibiotic bubble. This CDC Report summarizes the present state of disease reporting, in two pages. We need higher standards of reporting and legal penalties for failure to report.

Bruce Perens writes: Silicon Valley folks should, sometime, take the opportunity to view a launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lompoc is 4-5 hours from the Bay, 2.5 hours from LA if there's ever no traffic. An upcoming SpaceX launch is notable because it's their return to flight, months after their last attempt blew up on the pad during a pre-launch test. Read how to view the launch.

Eich resigned because of external pressure on the Mozilla organization. I hear that one of the lobbying activities against him was when the dating site "OK Cupid" started informing Firefox users who accessed the site of Eich's activities and that they should download a browser made by people who don't nominate someone with gender discrimination issues to be their CEO. At the time, 8% of OK Cupid customers were there to arrange same-gender meetings.

They felt he was the public face of the company.

Russ Nelson published a piece on what he theorized was the economic motivation of Blacks to be lazy, and was booted off of the Open Source Initiative board. He wasn't thinking about how it would be perceived. A modified version of the piece is still online, but not the version that got him in trouble. In general, executives are seen as the public faces of their organizations even in the case of Nelson, who was not the chairman of the board, but was simply a member of the executive board. In Nelson's case, it wasn't that he made publicity appearances and press releases, it was that he was one of the people with the power to direct the company (and thus a more real face of the company than soneone who just does PR), and folks did not trust that someone who wrote what he did would behave as they would like in that position.

It was only 1967 when the United States Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, a miscegenation case. Preventing blacks and whites from marrying, as the State of Virginia (and many others) did with laws on its books until it was forced to remove them in 1967, is an issue of racism, nothing else. One doesn't have to be thin skinned to be disgusted by racism.

Why should I feel any different about gender discrminiation? Texas had a law on the book making homosexual relations illegal in 1998, and two men were arrested for it and similarly to Loving, helped to strike it down in the courts. Marriage discrimination is yet another legal wall erected by the prejudiced. Doesn't take a thin skin at all to oppose it and its supporters.

Because you are an end-user and not an investor in these companies, you might actually think the public face of the companies is a logo or a trademark rather than a human being. Perhaps you think the public face of McDonalds is Ronald McDonald! Or that Sprint's used to be that actor who portrayed a technician. But this naiveté is not shared by the people who are the target audience for the public face that the CEO's appearances and quotations produce. AMD has people to handle the guy who once plugged one of their CPUs into a motherboard. The public face nurtured by the CEO is reserved for investors and business relationships, government, and corporate citizenship. These are all areas in which a decision made outside of the company can have great impact on the company. And so, if you go on the company site, you will see the CEO quoted in the press releases related to those items. At trade shows, you will see these CEOs as keynotes. I am heading for CES in January, where many CEOs you've never heard of who run large tech companies will be speaking, and there will be full halls of their eager target audiences.

Don't you think it might be self-centered to assume someone's not the public face of the company because you don't know who they are?

So.......we just had an article on Slashdot that showed there are more jobs in America now, at the end of the Obama administration, than there ever have been in the entire history of the US. More people working.

First, I'm not about to claim that Trump is going to improve anything for the common man. Having a populist revolt that emplaces a Billionare cabinet...

Yes, Obama got more people to work than anyone else ever. However, middle-class well-being has not correspondingly increased (meaning wages aren't great for a lot of those jobs) and the disparity between the most rich and everyone else has become much larger.

I haven't researched AI job reduction, but I think we could be no more than two decades away from the point where much menial labor is robotic and where professional drivers are for the most part replaced with machines.

Both Brexit and Trump can be seen as the final stage of neoliberal economics: it ends in a populist revolt.

It's not as if labor is just now facing the threat of automation. But nobody in the US - not the unions, not the companies, not the government - is solving the education gap that might help future workers.

MoCo could have paid as little as $1 for the license, along with an agreement to return profits, and that would be fair value. There's no question that the profits were returned.

However, there was never any possibility that any other entity would have been offered the license regardless of what they offered, and IMO had they considered that transaction based on the amount returned rather than achieving their purpose of a free internet, they would have disqualified themselves as a 501(c)3.